The History of the M1 Garand
John Garand

John Garand

John Cantius Garand
was born on New Year's Day, 1888, in
Saint-Rémy, Quebec.
The family moved to Connecticut in 1898, and at the age of 11
John Garand started working in a textile mill, learning
as much as he could from the mill's machinists.
He moved to tool-making, and his hobby of target shooting
and gun design led to a career in which he developed one
of the U.S. military's most successful infantry weapons.

John Garand with an example of his design, the
United States Rifle, Caliber .30, M1,
around 1943.

Saint-Rémy, Quebec, was a small place.
It was only incorporated as a town in 1975,
and its population in 2006 was just 6,136.
Saint-Rémy is on the far southern edge of Quebec,
in the Montérégie region
south of Montréal and just north of the northern
edge of New York.
It's an almost exclusively French-speaking place — 96.06%
of the population reported speaking nothing but French in
the 2006 census.

I had read that John Garand himself,
along with his family,
preferred that it be pronounced so as to rhyme with "errand",
GEHR-and.
However, someone recently contacted me with an interesting
message:

As a volunteer for the National Park Service at
Springfield Armory National Historic Site,
I have had the honor of speaking with John Garand's
son, Richard, on a number of occasions.
Naturally, the first time I met him, I asked
the obvious question—How do you
pronounce your name?
He answered that the family pronounced it guh-RAND.

Strictly speaking, the people back home in Saint-Rémy
would say that both guh-RAND and GEHR-and
are wrong — all the Garands in
North America are descended from Pierre Garand, who lived
from about 1643 to 1700 in Rouen, France.
The real pronunciation of that French family name has a final
nasal "a",
sort of gahr-ON,
or [garɑ~] in IPA.

The Garand family, however you pronounce their name,
moved from Saint-Rémy to rural Connecticut in 1898,
when John was ten years old.
He attended school for just another year,
only until the age of 11,
and then started working in a Connecticut textile mill.
He started as a floor sweeper, but learned as much as he
could from the mill's machinists.

He was eventually promoted to the position of machinist
at the textile mill.
During his time there he patented both a telescopic
screw jack and an automatic bobbin winding machine.

He gained more experience and was took a position with
Brown and Sharpe,
a tool-making company in Providence, Rhode Island.

Along the way he had developed an interest in
target shooting, and this, along with his expertise
with machining, led to a hobby of designing guns.
That hobby turned into the career for which
he is famous.

John Garand working on his T3E2 design, about 1929.

World War I had started in the summer of 1914, and by 1917
the United States was about to become fully involved.
There were many new technological developments in this
war — tanks, poison gas, and the common use of
machine guns.
The U.S. Army announced that it was taking bids on a new
design for a light machine gun.
This announcement caught Garand's interest.

John Garand (at left, in the suit)
in the Springfield Armory shop in 1923.

He was working in New York City by this time.
Garand made a deal with another gun designer, John Kewish.
Kewish paid Garand $50 per week, and promised to develop
Garand's design.
In June 1918,
they demonstrated their first prototype to Hudson Maxim,
the brother of Hiram Maxim, the prominent gun designer.
Hudson Maxim recommended that they demonstrate their design
to the Naval Consulting Board.
The NCB in turn referred them to the Army War College,
which eventually led to the Ordnance Department,
which turned them down.

They went back to the Naval Consulting Board, which sent them
on to the National Bureau of Standards.
The NBS paid Garand and another machinist $35 per week (with
Kewish paying each another $15) and allowed them to use the
NBS machine shop to further develop and improve the design.
This started in August 1818, just three months before the
end of World War I in November, 1918.

The first model of the final design was finally built in 1919,
close to a year after the end of the war,
but the U.S. War Department appreciated his talent.

Garand was given a position in November, 1919 as
a consulting engineer at the Springfield Armory,
in Springfield, Massachusetts.
He became a U.S. citizen after taking that position,
and rose to the position of Chief Civilian Engineer.

Here you see the model shop, the experimental shop in which
Garand and his team developed his innovative designs
from the 1920s until Garand's retirement in 1953.
Notice all the overhead belt power!

Garand can be seen at the far right background,
a small detail of which appears above.
He is examining a prototype Model 1922
and pointing to drawings of his design.

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